Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
and ‘essential form’. Any attempt to retrieve the latter is either diverting
or facile, we must look-at-things-as-they-are in each and every case. 21 The
prime cultural value now becomes ‘face-value’. A pre-modern faith in the
deity has been replaced by modernity’s faith in the precision of human
optics buttressed by a serious commitment to surface.
This new realism takes a further step away from the texture of actual
social relations when, in its technical and clinical guise of scientific
methodology, it wilfully abandons all judgements of value (other than facevalue).
We now have a vision that regards itself as pure and which also
parades both its a-morality and its anti-aesthetic.
The overwhelming appeal of such a rigid and intransigent relation
between vision and visual field must surely derive from its strengths in
protecting the variety of interests inherent in any social order of signs and
images. This visual fixity is one that is dominant and consistent within our
modern, Western cultural cognitions, upheld largely through the agency of
scientific practice. Such a ‘plain view’ of reality must surely rest upon and
also project a consensus ‘world-view’. The programme set within modern
culture for the supposed unification of seeing obviates the disruptive
abrasion of conflict and the necessity for discussions of difference. Any
alternative ‘visions’ or ‘perspectives’ can be rendered intelligible in the
form of deviance or, rather, ‘distortion’. The moral basis of the consensus
‘view’, within this self-confirming hall of mirrors, is never questioned and
consequently our ‘sight’ and the object of our ‘sight’ are systematically
undisturbed by the dissonance of choice or interpretation. This has long
been a topic for fine art and even psychology, but it is late coming to social
theory and it has certainly not impacted onto everyday life.
The sustained visual constraint of the modern era has, in large part, been
enabled through the collusion of science, or rather the ideology of
scientism, in our cultural outlook. Scientism is not the professional practice
of genuine scientists but the naive and popular attitude that ascribes the
conferment of truth to the infrastructure of technicism around which the
economy has developed. Science, or rather scientism, is bestowed the duty
of ‘imaging’ reality, as part of the exercise of its role in manufacturing
‘truth’ throughout modernity. This view finds support in the work of Jay:
The assumption…that Cartesian perspectivalism is the reigning visual
model of modernity is often tied to the further contention that it
succeeded in becoming so because it best expressed the ‘natural’
experience of science valorized by the scientific world-view. 22
And also that of Ivins:
Today there are few sciences or technologies that are not predicated in one
way or another upon this power of invariant pictorial symbolization. 23
7